The Fisters and Their Friends

My name is Alexander Cheves. My nickname is Beastly. I write about sex. I wrote a book.

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Hello, I have a question for you. I am a gay male that loves to get fisted a number of times. I found that my insides get very tight and my husband can’t deal with the pain. I don’t feel pain but I do feel it getting tighter. I wanted to know if this is normal? Thank you, Vin

Hi there Vin,

I’m reading your question this way: your hole feels like it gets tighter during a fisting session, and your husband experiences pain while fisting you, which I suppose means that he feels tightness and pressure on his hand and/or forearm, and you want to know if this is normal.

Yes, some tops report uncomfortable tightness and even wrist bruising from fisting tighter holes. That said, safe fisting, with proper lube, should create the opposite feeling of tightening up. Temporarily at least, you should feel opened up, roomy — until your butt grows “hot,” as I call it. The inside of your body is, as you can imagine, warm, but an experienced fist top can notice a few degrees temperature increase that’s usually a sign of irritation, which means you’re getting close to the end of that particular session. With irritation, your butt might grow a bit tighter.

In my experience, this happens most often when you go rough. Punch fisting, for example, can make my anal sphincter swell up a bit, especially within an hour or so after play has stopped. If you think this may be the case, I’d just recommend easing up a bit, drawing out the session, going slower, and using more lube.

Though the erotic practice of fisting has been around since ancient times, it is still tissue trauma. I tell everyone who enjoys FF to be aware of what it is: controlled, gradual stretching and manipulation of the anal canal and, for some, the deeper colons. That stretching and manipulation inevitably involve blood and small tears, so a substantial part of fisting is about mitigating risk and preventing infection (we use thick, goopy lube for a reason). In terms of infection risk, fisting is pretty low on the risk threshold — I’ve even seen it recommended as a safer-sex alternative for folks looking to avoid fluid exchange. But all fisting, even safe and gentle fisting, will make you bleed sometimes and will lead to some tissue swelling and irritation — that’s just part of the practice — so it’s important to know when to call it a night. With training, you can extend your endurance, but everyone has a limit and those limits must be respected by all participating parties. I don’t know at what point in your play that you experience this tightening feeling, but it’s fair to say that you should probably read it as a sign to go more gently, slow down, or wrap things up.

All this being said, this is all just conjecture, and conjecture is not ideal where one’s health is concerned. It’s never a bad idea to talk to a doctor. If you don’t feel comfortable telling your doctor that you fist — which is not a great situation, as your goal should be to have a doctor to whom you can tell the whole truth, but I know this is not always possible — you can tell them that you experience this in regular anal sex. If you don’t feel safe telling that to your doctor, you need a new doctor as soon as possible. Both regular anal sex and fisting can (and do) result in tissue irritation.

And if this is simply a case of your top not enjoying the feeling of working open your tight butt, he should get over it, or you should find a new top. When I’ve heard fisting tops talk about hand bruising when working open tight holes, I’ve had very little sympathy for them. In fisting, bottoms assume the risk of severe injury, perforation, infection, blunt trauma, and much else, while tops risk a little bruising and a slight chance of infection (if they have open cuts on their hand) from fecal matter — in other words, bottoms assume far greater physical risk. Sure, it may be more fun to fist a hole that opens up easily, but beginner fist bottoms exist and more and more folks are coming into the FFold every day. And even among experienced fist pigs, some bottoms simply have butts that must be re-opened slowly every time — that’s just how their butts are. While you can train your butt, I recommend approaching its unique features with acceptance — it’s your fun little fist butt, after all. If he’s complaining that you’re “too tight,” maybe you should stop playing with him.

Love, Beastly

Hey man, I’ve been reading some of your articles on how to become a better bottom. you talk about stretching using toys. Personally, I cannot get toys. Do you have any recommendations for stretching without toys?

Howdy,

Many people don’t “get” toys. But if you want to develop your skills as a bottom, you might have to approach toys not as pleasure objects but as tools. I’ll be blunt: ass training with toys is not always loads of fun — in fact, it can feel like a chore. But it makes a huge difference. It can be dangerous to go long periods between fist sessions without using toys or doing any anal stretching between them; you’re more likely to get hurt if you try to jump back in the saddle after several months off and expect yourself to go just as hard. If you want to develop your skills as a bottom — as a fist bottom or otherwise — I encourage playing with toys regularly, even if you don’t love them. Treat it like a gym membership, something you do to keep your hand in (put intended), especially if you’re not playing regularly, like every week or more.

There are probably skilled fist bottoms out there who don’t use toys, but I don’t know a single one. Every skilled bottom I know has found a place in their practice for toys and learned to enjoy them. My bottoming life is better when I remember to sit on my plugs a few times a week. I’m pretty good at this, and I can still tell when I’ve gone a few weeks without some ass training with toys — my butt feels it the next time I play.

But yes, there are exercises and stretching techniques that don’t require toys and can be done solo. Look up pelvic floor exercises for men and kegel exercises for men. Both types of exercise can be helpful in keeping your muscles down there stretched and strong. My hip abductor muscles in my legs are always tightening up on me, which creates groin pain, and pelvic floor exercises help with that, so the benefits of these exercises are far-reaching. But I still recommend toys. I didn’t enjoy toys at first — not for years, in fact. Once I started using them regularly, my bottoming skills jumped forward in a relatively short amount of time. Like red wine, toys were an acquired taste, something I learned to enjoy and appreciate more as I played harder.

Love, Beastly

Hola Alex, leí tu blog de FF, luego de eso corrí a darle una clase a mi grupo FF Colombia usando tu material, a todos nos encanto, es él tutoría más completo y real acerca de la práctica … me encanta cuando hablas acerca de la prepotencia del fister y que no existe el Dios del Fisting, es muy cierto, muchos fister (y me incluyo) aveces pensamos que somos el mejor en la práctica y olvidamos que todos fuimos novatos… yo fui novato hace muchos años, pero me esfuerzo por seguir aprendiendo todos los días como si fuese el primer día … disculpa por enviarte mi mensaje en español, me pondré muy atento a la clase de inglés para pronto escribirte en tu idioma … felicitaciones, me encanto tu blog de consejos y por último decirte que estás muy guapo !! 👊🏼❤️🐽

¡Hola! Gracias por el amable cumplido. Creo que muchos chicos de FF serían mucho más felices y tendrían mejor sexo si pudieran recordar esa simple verdad: todos fuimos novatos alguna vez.

Lamentablemente, no hablo español, ¡así que espero que este mensaje de Google Translate funcione! Gracias por leer mi blog.

Amor, Beastly

Hi Alex, I am a fisting bottom who recently moved to Mexico. I used to use a shower attachment to clean but I’m not sure it’s a good idea to do with the water here. I have no idea who to talk to/ask about this concern. Do you have any thoughts/recommendations?

Hi there,

The Spanish-speaking gentleman above is from Colombia. In his message, he says he read an article of mine before he “ran to give a class to my FF Colombia group.” This tells me that there are probably countless FF communities across Central and South America. So any advice I give you is less valuable than the advice your local comrades in Mexico can give you. Go find your FFriends.

Douche water is a debated topic among fisters and bottoms of all stripes. I answered a question about this in my last fisting post — take a look. Some say you should make a simple saline solution and only douche with that; they say the pH balance of saline is safest for the human body. That may be so, but I have doubts, especially when certain brands charge a lot of money for “specially-formulated douching formulas,” which they say are essential for safe douching. That doesn’t quite pass my smell test and feels like a scam — and even if it’s not a scam, it looks like one, which is the problem.

The fact is, all douching is probably pretty unhealthy for the body, and over-douching certainly is. The entire idea of douching itself is arguably a scam, as douching before anal sex only became widely practiced in the last thirty years or so. You should talk to guys some generations older, men who played in the bacchanal heydays of the 1970s: no one douched regularly then besides a few fist pigs in San Francisco and New York. Anal sex was accepted as a messy affair, and I imagine that even the fist pigs who douched for their fun times in the bygone fisting clubs of America’s cities did so without as much pressure or anxiety that fisting guys experience now. They were playing in the butt, where, inevitably, you’re going to hit pay dirt. Shit was part of a good sex life for them, and they still managed to create one of the greatest periods for gay sex in history, one that hasn’t been repeated (AIDS and its cultural ramifications made sure of that). I’ve met several older gay men who believe beyond a fraction of a doubt that the standardization of douching as an assumed preparation for anal play happened in response to AIDS and was, in fact, a result of AIDS panic. One common feature of all AIDS patients was the loss of bowel control, so for those who cared for their loved ones and watched them die, shit and diarrhea became part of a slow, horrible death. It’s not wild speculation to imagine that excrement was not viewed favorably for a while.

Today, we live in cultures that were transformed by AIDS and the widespread stigma that formed in its wake. Gay sex needed a more sanitized image in the wake of AIDS; gay men likely became more germaphobic and cleanliness-focused. It’s not a stretch to imagine that in the forty years we’ve been dealing with this pandemic, visions of gay sex have started to assume and even mandate a shit-free experience — and if you don’t supply that experience, you’ve somehow failed as a bottom. Many gay men ask me what’s “wrong” with them when they struggle to clean out fully, which means we’ve literally pathologized something the body does naturally — poop. This is not a good state of things. No one, not even expert bottoms who douche regularly, can completely control the body every time. The body and its bowels are unpredictable.

So all this fuss over what water is best is, to me, a little silly. There’s probably no completely safe way to douche. But if you choose to douche before sex (I do), it’s recommended — by me and countless health experts — that you minimize the douching regimen as much as you can. No matter what you’re doing to clean out, you’re probably douching too long and putting too much water up there. It is likely true that saline and/or distilled water are safest, and you can make a simple saline solution from recipes on the internet; you can use filtered, distilled, and purified water, if you can access them. All these are surely safer for the delicate environs of your bowels than tap water, and this is true regardless of where you live. But practically speaking, you’d have to make a lot of saline or buy a lot of distilled water to do this every time, and to have enough water to douche for fisting. This is why so many bottoms shrug at the real risks associated with using tap — the alternatives are simply much more work. I confess that I use tap most of the time, though I do practice a douching regimen that doesn’t take too long or put too much water in me (and I do have tummy issues, which have gotten worse as I’ve aged; it is very likely that these facts are connected).

Make your own choices. I do not know enough about the water in your area to give you a more definite answer, but caution is never discouraged and it can’t be a bad idea to use alternatives to tap water. But all sex contains some risk, and I will go to my grave preaching that joy and pleasure outweigh most things, especially when we all live in bodies that will die. Seek the thoughts and advice of your fellow fist pigs in Mexico, who will likely be far more helpful than I am.

Love, Beastly